We citizens are on a need to know basis

Steve Henson is The Chieftainís managing editor. He can be reached at 544-0006, ext. 410; at shenson@chieftain.com; on Twitter @SteveHensonME.

by steve henson

Published: April 20, 2014;Last modified: April 23, 2014 12:44PM

There is a disturbing trend in local government, and it’s growing.

That trend is, local elected officials do not want you to hear how they reach difficult or sensitive decisions. They want to have their tough discussions behind closed doors — the politically correct term is “executive session” — and then come out into the public light, pretend they’re all one big happy group of officials, and present a proposal as if everyone totally agreed on it.

The intent behind Colorado’s public meetings law is very clear: The public has a right to know how decisions are reached. Boards such as city councils, school boards and county commissioners are very limited in what they can talk about behind closed doors.

For example, they can discuss a personnel matter, e.g., a department head has been putting in three-hour days and the board is deciding whether to discipline and retain the employee, or fire that employee.

The Pueblo City Council’s recent discussions regarding a plan to raid the city’s half-cent sales tax dedicated to economic development illustrate what a board is NOT allowed to discuss behind closed doors.

Our council has gone behind closed doors to discuss what is inarguably a very sensitive topic. And that is, the council needs money for things like streets projects, and it sees a potential funding source — the half-cent sales tax revenues.

That is taxpayer money, and the use of that money has been clearly earmarked all along. It is to be used to attract primary jobs to our community. Period. Nothing else.

To access that money for other purposes, the council would have to get the voters’ permission, and that would mean the council would have to place the question on the November ballot.

So the council has been meeting in secret — when you meet behind closed doors, those are secret meetings; don’t try to put lipstick on that pig — to come up with the right language for such a ballot proposal.

Councilman Chris Nicoll blew the whistle on his colleagues this past week, going to the media with his concerns that the meetings weren’t proper and that a lot of work on the proposal had been done out of view of the public.

Other council members criticized him, saying he should have objected while in executive session.

Yes, he should have. But talk about peer pressure. You have another six council people who aren’t objecting and a city attorney who, according to another councilman, didn’t say, “Whoa, hold on there. Can’t talk about that in here.”

What also is troubling is that this latest incident is a trend. It is getting more and more difficult to get information from official sources, and less and less business is being done at public meetings.

A couple of examples:

We pushed and pulled and hassled Pueblo City Schools until it released information about a South teacher who got too close to a student. Amazingly, that information showed that the district had cut a deal with the teacher, promising not to fight her unemployment and also not oppose her future employment elsewhere.

In Canon City, it’s been weeks since a mother and her two children were killed in their home, and we still don’t know how they died. Officials there refuse to say, claiming they need to keep that information secret until the court case proceeds. And a judge — and this is happening more and more, too — issued a gag order prohibiting officials from talking about the case.

What the elected officials, including judges, and other officials don’t get is this: The public has a right to know these things. We elected you. You owe us an explanation for every official action you take, for every taxpayer dollar you spend.

Likewise, a community deserves to know how a neighbor died, and think of this: Perhaps putting out that information might produce additional evidence, maybe a witness who — after hearing the cause of death — might know where a weapon had been purchased. Or maybe the witness had seen the suspect in possession of the weapon.

I think we need to remember all of this secret behavior when election time rolls around.

If an elected official who prefers to play in the dark seeks re-election, let’s make sure he or she doesn’t return to the public spotlight.